All right, Votes for Deletion is broken. There's something seriously, deliriously wrong when [[Gene Ray]] is listed on Votes for Deletion.
In the same way that we trust users to delete pages that should *obviously* be deleted, we should trust users to remove pages from VfD that should *obviously* not be deleted. Entries that have been edited so that there is no doubt that they should be deleted should be able to be removed immediately from the VfD page.
This still isn't the solution that I would propose for the situation, but it would at least be a brake on the current runaway freight train of deletion.